Startup 101: Handling

Sandara probably should have been paying more attention to the battle, but someone needed to keep all these gawkers focused on keeping the ship moving at a respectable pace. The bastard was quick, very quick, using one of those sword magic tricks Tien folks liked to show off with to make everything that little bit worse. The crow man’s blade was bloody cold when he tried to behead her. Really, absurdly cold, given that she was even able to notice the temperature when she had a sword in her neck.

Bloody hell! This isn’t gonna look good to Besmara. Hopefully I won’t end up in the Kelpie’s fleet. He’s probably still sore.

Wait a second. Why am I thinking about it? Shouldn’t I be dead by now?

Sandara was no expert on dying, but she’d done it once so she knew more about it than most people on the crew. In her experience, when someone cut a major artery of yours it felt a bit like when someone spiked your drink with a little something extra. Sure it hurts, but it doesn’t take long before your limbs start feeling heavy, you lose focus, and it stops hurting pretty quick.

She wasn’t feeling any of that. She just knew that her neck was bloody, fucking, unbearably cold, and the pearl she had hanging in a cage down the front of her shirt felt warm. Actually, only those things. Everything else, the whole damn world, was nothing but a blur.

Heal yourself, you idiot girl.

How can I do that? I’m halfway through- oh. This is like that thing Emrys was talking about.

Feeling just a mite sheepish that she had to have it spelled out for her, Sandara did as the voice of her goddess commanded and pulled on the thread of positive energy she’d been granted years ago in that desert. Warmth spread through her body, flowing out across the whole crew, and the pain returned.

The Tengu swordsman, Hyrix Snowfeather, gasped in surprise as the full weight of his body was stopped cold. His spinning blow reversed before he even touched the ground, and he pulled the blade spattered in frozen blood back into a defensive posture.

Sandara, feeling a bit lightheaded, tried to take a breath but ended up coughing up blood instead. She did manage to croak out something about Besmara liking her, but she was largely allowing her mouth to be insulting without oversight. She trusted herself to come up with something reasonably clever.

Well, Besmara saved me, but let’s see what we can do while he’s here.

Sandara let her other self step away, and suddenly Hyrix was looking at two Sandaras instead of one. It wasn’t a reliable trick, but a coin flip was far better than a sure thing when it came to getting a sword in the gut. Cog and Syl were both busy with the rest of the boarding party, but it looked like Filli was just about done with what she was doing at the stern. Sandara circled Snowfeather to put herself between the Tengu and the bow, and with a flick of the wrist she called a Divine Trident into her hand.

It wasn’t quite so strong as Emrys’s ice magic, and was a laughable spark next to the blade she’d seen Besmara wield in her vision, but a weightless bolt of lightning about five feet long was a pretty fair weapon. It handled like her cutlass, and as Snowfeather learned with his first probing attack it could block like one too. His blade slipped through her guard, but never somewhere quite so sensitive as her throat. Indeed, when he did manage to strike her leg hard enough to break the plates in her armored coat and the bones beneath it, she was treated to another demonstration of the pearl.

Never shall we die indeed.

He was a much better swordsman than Sandara, and he dispelled Sandara’s double right quick on top of that lucky shot to the leg. In other circumstances she’d have preferred to cast Sanctuary and scarper off. The pearl seemed to gobble up her magic to let her use it faster; she was burning through her positive energy wellspring twice as fast. It really wasn’t a good idea to stand and fight.

Well, it wouldn’t have been if Filli wasn’t bounding across the deck with murder in her eyes.

Hyrix twisted his body around to dodge a strike from Sandara’s trident that came at the same moment as a bolt of frost from Emrys, and unfortunately he glanced behind himself for a moment as he did. It would have been nice to seen the dodgy little bastard smashed into the deck like that drow girl Filli seemed to know from somewhere. He turned his dodge into a roll, narrowly avoiding a strike that cracked the deck, and reached into his pocket.

He crushed a small ceramic ball, the kind alchemists used, and a plume of smoke enveloped the deck near where he’d been standing. The continuous magical gale blew that away right quick, and the boarders, fallen or standing, were gone when it cleared.

••••••••••

Rowe yelled at the skinny girls in common, keeping her orders calm, clear, and specific so that the new recruits would be able to understand what she wanted. Naturally, she also kept her firearm ready in case the perimeter was breached and something came down to attack the non-combatants. The brothel girls were pretty good workers, honestly, and she’d probably ask if any of them wanted onto the gunnery crew. She could use a few more level heads.

“More pillows!” Rowe yelled at them, gesturing wildly with her gun. “Pillows! Bedrolls! Clothes! Doesn’t matter as long as it’s soft! And bring me more rope!”

The girls were all so pale that the one with rock skin didn’t even stand out, but they were doing a great job. The now-former prostitutes tore through the possessions of everyone on the crew, heaping fabric into a giant mass that reached the ceiling of the room. Rowe was fairly sure that there was another word for ceilings on ships, but common was a stupid language and she refused to retain multiple words for the same thing in her head.

She’d considered going for the kitchen staff to help her out, but Rowe had absolutely no time to wade through lectures about traditional values. Salyar had come unprompted, but the rest of the goblin matrons in the kitchen seemed to think they were too good to save the ship just because they were “chained to various appliances.” As if that were an excuse.

Meanwhile, Rowe was tying every single piece of rope she could find to the mast, measured through the incredibly precise goblin technique of eyeballing it so that they’d all have a roughly equal amount of slack. Then the really fun part came, where she quickly grabbed a heavy mallet, the engine, and an eyebolt. She lined up the bolt so that it was aligned with a non-essential part of the drum, and with a single firm blow she drove the metal rod into the Kinetic Transfer Engine.

It started like a sleeping dog slapped on the rump, and much like such a dog it immediately leapt wildly away and slammed into a wall. Thankfully, the large pile of soft cloth absorbed the force of the leap.

Rowe picked her gun back up and barked at the dwarf girl and the rock girl, who seemed like the strongest of the group of entertainers.

“You two. Carry it back over here.” Rowe yelled.

They seemed confused, so Rowe pointed her gun arm at them, helpfully indicating who she was referring to.

“Now!”

••••••••••

The second boarding party came way the hell too close to success for comfort, and worse it didn’t have the same delay between strikes Gobron had used last time. He’d relied on days of low pressure attacks that didn’t cost him much, leaning hard on his own regenerating forcefield. It seemed pretty clear that Nendra, or whoever was in charge of tactics over there, had a different approach.

Every strike is a targeted strike, and they send them just as quick as they can assemble the team.

We’d won the first few engagements, but that didn’t mean as much as I wished it did. In a perfect world we’d take advantage of their bloodied nose to turn around and make a boarding action of our own. In this world, they outnumbered us almost two to one, the individual matchups didn’t look great, and Sandara was already half depleted. Escape was still absolutely the plan.

Time stuttered along as the battle underwater continued. I had very little idea what the hell was going on beyond the fact that nearly a dozen fiendish sharks had been thrown into the drink after my girls. I was tempted to call back Ve’ra for a report, but resisted. I’d cast shadow claws so she could meaningfully contribute to the fight, and my combat log made it very clear she was absolutely laying into “Enslaved Gargantuan Elemental B.” She was way too busy to waste time assuaging my fears.

I spent entirely too much time disentangling the situation, roughly half of which was just me working through an anxiety spiral after seeing Sandara’s near death. As it turns out, the source of the sharks was Sinkitah. In addition to a laser umbrella, her “Lauriger Occultist” class apparently gave her a pocketwatch or compass that could toss out summoned monsters en masse. Her character sheet didn’t elaborate on anything I hadn’t seen her do already, but she had a pretty long list of talents and at least two more “implements” like the umbrella and compass.

Hyrix’s Mystic class seemed to be some kind of anime bullshit melee fighter class. A few members of my team had “special techniques,” most notably Cog’s Punishment ability that let him redirect a ton of damage into an enemy, but from what I could see Hyrix’s character sheet was roughly fifty percent kanji by volume and they were all pretentious sounding martial arts moves.

Mom insisting that I learn mandarin meant that I could get the gist of a lot of them, and most of them included references to snow, ice, or cold. He’d almost killed Sandara with something I was pretty sure translated to “Mountain Wind Strike,” for example.

The man understands branding, I’ll give him that. Shame I can’t pay the guy off. I’d like to talk to him about Varossa, and I’d really prefer to not have a repeat of the last minute targeting someone who doesn’t have a divinely sponsored emergency heal.

Worst of all, they were both pretty clearly in the same weight class as anyone on my crew going by their levels.

Filli was still an unbeatable behemoth, but that was more because she couldn’t be killed. There was nearly black blood all over the stern from where Xenobia nearly severed her hand. Regeneration was powerful, but I doubted it was impossible to shut off by cauterizing the wound or something.

Even the rank and file on the Magpie Prince seemed pretty beefy. They were only level 3, like my guys, but they were level 3 Warriors. Warrior was a terrible class fit for background extras in a fight scene, but in a fight they could pull their weight against any other NPC class. A few of my guys were Pactbound, or Artisans, or even PC classes like Conchobar’s Bard class, but most of them were level 3 Commoners. The prostitutes still huddling in the hold weren’t even level 3 yet. They hadn’t had time to grow into their boosted power level.

In short, if they catch up and this turns into a knock down, drag out fight? It’ll be a bloodbath at best. I guess it’s time to at least consider negotiations again.

I looked back at Nendra’s ship, watching Nendra pace back and forth on the foredeck and shriek at me. I’d mostly tuned her out, but the channel was still open.

“You will drop anchor and return to me and maybe, if you’re lucky, I won’t sell your entire crew into slavery!” She yelled, “I try to be nice. I try to be reasonable. I try to make amends and offer a better arrangement, and what do you do? You drug me and my friends and run away! Do you have any idea how humiliating that is? If you won’t love me, then perhaps I need to break you to the lash? Is that what you want? To force me to be a monster? Answer me!”

“Nendra.” I grumbled. “This isn’t about you. It’s never been about you, not really, and if you want to reconcile, this is sure as shit not how you do it.”

“Oh, what do you prefer instead? To let you run about, sleeping with mayflies left and right?” Nendra demanded, “To simply accept in front of everyone that I have no control over my own Shadow? Do you have any idea how that would look to the other houses? Not even those idiots in N’Quinn put up with this kind of insubordination!”

I let her rant, thankful that talking was, somehow, a free action. Then my eyes drifted next to her, landing again on Jan’Nai. I’d added her to my party a long, long time ago but last I’d checked she had still been a level one “bereft sorceress” which as far as I could tell was just commoner with extra steps.

She wasn’t anymore. Some time in the last several weeks, she’d changed classes and gained multiple levels. She was now a level 4 Oracle of Callistria. A quick scan of her character sheet confirmed that she was actually quite dangerous now, to my wife in particular.

Nearly every aspect of her class and spell selection was tailor made to shrug off magic and strengthen herself so she didn’t need to worry about a drow noble’s magic resistance. She could probably shrug off anything Nendra could throw at her better than I could, despite being half my level.

Yeah… I doubt she’s dumb enough to have not gotten the message herself. Callistria has her prepped to kill Nendra or die trying. Come to think of it, she’s not really looking at Nendra, she’s looking at Xenobia.

I dragged up a power I’d rarely used, a quirk of my Rakshasa bloodline that let me disguise one magical effect as another. With it, I hid another communication channel within a touch up of the winds, creating a nearly undetectable link between myself and the half-drow slave girl.

“Are you equipped and willing to help me if I launch a counterattack?” I asked, causing her to jump. “I think I can get you out of there, but I need you to do something for me.”

Time resumed as I asked the question, and I kicked myself for overstepping what I could do with free actions.

“Vorys has a ghost bound to her.” Jan’Nai said. “I think she can use it as a weapon. If you can take her out of the picture, I can kill Nendra.”

“Don’t; she’s too likely to be able to shrug it off.” I said, taking a deep breath. “There’s someone else much more important for us to eliminate, and it needs to be at exactly the right moment. I promise you’ll get plenty of opportunities to hurt her later if this works.”

I called over Dierdre, and distantly wished that I’d asked Yael to stick around. I was going to want to talk to her about today. Someone around my age, acting as an officer in an active war zone, sounded like exactly who I would need to talk to. I let my team know what I’d be doing the next time the enemy boarded, so they wouldn’t be surprised.

Then, so calmly that I could almost pretend it wasn’t me doing it, I planned out and ordered the murder of another sapient being.